Search form

Election Security

Election Security

Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy. The mechanics of how we vote, and how those votes are counted, are critical to ensuring our votes are meaningful. EFF supports paper records for every vote, and automatic,
risk limiting audits
for every election. We'll oppose legislation that doesn't include those two critical measures. EFF opposes online voting.

In 2018, several senators introduced the Protecting American Votes and Elections (PAVE) Act. This proposal mandates the use of paper ballots and risk-limiting audits in every federal election, which will assure that our democratic process isn’t hijacked by hackers or foreign powers. It’s a great step forward, and we hope Congress considers a similar bill in a future session.

Paper Records

Touchscreen voting machines, counting machines, and other devices involved in elections are subject to hacking. Such attacks by their very nature can be stealthy and ambiguous. A skillful attack can tamper with voting machines and then delete itself, making it impossible to prove after the fact that an election suffered interference. Paper records ensure that it is possible to detect and quickly correct for such interference.
Many states
still don't follow this baseline best practice.

Risk Limiting Audits

To catch vote tampering, it's important to check some paper records by hand, and not rely on a
machine “recount.”
An audit shouldn't be a special occurrence during a disputed election. High-quality audits should be automatic, regular parts of our democratic process. Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs) are a proven, innovative way to pick a small sample of ballots for manual counting while achieving a very high level of statistical confidence that any electronic vote-tampering will be detected. This makes them cheap enough to perform audits on every election. As of 2018, three states have implemented RLA mandates, with Colorado leading the way. The other forty-seven should do the same as soon as possible.

No Online Voting

Proposals surface every now and then to allow voting from home or abroad via smartphones or laptops. Security experts are near-unanimous that this is unacceptably risky, and EFF supports this conclusion.

EFF recently launched the Paper or Plastic 2004 campaign to let California voters know they have the legal right to vote on paper at the polls today, but we've only had a week or so to get the word out, and we're not sure how far the news has...

More details have emerged on the e-voting meltdown in New Orleans. With 80+ incidents being reported through the EIRS in only the first few hours of voting, it seems clear that election officials did not anticipate the machines breaking down and do not have adequate back-up procedures. Two...

It looks like New Orleans is becoming a major hotspot for voting problems: there are reports through the EIRS of more than 80 incidents, some involving entire precincts, with the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline ringing off the hook. "In a situation like this, election officials should start offering people paper ballots...

There are new reports today through the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) of machine failure in many precincts in Philadelphia. This is resulting in long lines and some people leaving without voting. While some machines have been fixed, others are reportedly still not working. The good news: poll workers...

Unfortunately, this problem -- spotted early on -- isn't going away. Voters from at least half a dozen states reported that touch-screen voting machines had incorrectly recorded their choices, including for president. Voters discovered the problems when checking the review screen at the end of the voting process...